A Los Angeles cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) is stunned to learn that his latest fare, Vincent (Tom Cruise) is a contract killer who has hijacked his cab to complete five hits in one night, in "Collateral." (AP Photo/ Frank Connor) less

A Los Angeles cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) is stunned to learn that his latest fare, Vincent (Tom Cruise) is a contract killer who has hijacked his cab to complete five hits in one night, in "Collateral." (AP ... more

Photo: FRANK CONNOR

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CN-331 Director MICHAEL MANN (left) goes over a scene with stars TOM CRUISE and JAMIE FOXX on the set of DreamWorks Pictures� and Paramount Pictures� thriller COLLATERAL.
Photo: Frank Connor

CN-331 Director MICHAEL MANN (left) goes over a scene with stars TOM CRUISE and JAMIE FOXX on the set of DreamWorks Pictures� and Paramount Pictures� thriller COLLATERAL.
Photo: Frank Connor

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TURNING CRUISE INTO THE BAD GUY

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2004-08-08 04:00:00 PDT Los Angeles -- There aren't many people who would inspire squeaky-clean Tom Cruise to unleash the F-word -- in a good way. But at a news conference last week, the most bankable star in Hollywood praised the director of his new film "Collateral" with an unscripted aside.

"Working with Michael is such a great pleasure because he is so confident and cares so passionately about the details of his characters. There's a line in 'Heat' that I love: 'The action is the juice.' That's what it's like working with Michael Mann. And I know this is driving Michael crazy, listening to all this, but f -- you, Michael, you're going to suffer!"

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Cruise had reason to be effusive. "Collateral" marks a dramatic departure for the perpetual good guy, who plays a stone-cold hit man -- "Rough trade in a good suit," as Mann describes it. Cruise's killer enlists a cabdriver (Jamie Foxx) to assist him on a dusk-to-dawn shooting spree through the palm- lined streets of Los Angeles.

Cruise and rising star Foxx, who appears this fall in the Ray Charles biopic "Ray," are just the latest leading men to give themselves over to Mann's tutelage. Over the course of eight films and three TV shows, including the iconic '80s series "Miami Vice," Mann has emerged as alpha director to the alpha males, coaxing visceral performances from James Caan, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Daniel Day-Lewis, William Petersen and Will Smith, among others.

"What happens when you get Tom Cruise playing a bad man -- and not a genre G-rated villain, but somebody who resonates with the real world -- is that Tom is then on a frontier," Mann said of his current star. "He's not done this before, so you get these moments where you really get into the zone, and that's where the really good stuff starts to happen."

A Chicago native, Mann studied documentary filmmaking in England and moved west 18 years ago. After directing "Ali" and "The Insider," which won a collective nine Oscar nominations, Mann was looking for a script that would allow him some poetic license.

"I made two motion pictures in a row dealing with actual historical events, and that imposed upon me obligations to be authentic. ... I wanted to not be restricted in those ways. I wanted something that was intense, which meant it had a short time frame, and I wanted something that moved, that would allow me to manipulate mood and color and music, something where I could just play with the poetics of film form."

The "Collateral" script was originally set in New York, "but L.A. is a much better choice," Mann says. "This town has got a quality of light, and this ocean marine Technicolor landscape of old dreams kind of layered on with new ethnic groups moving in and taking over neighborhoods. You can move all that around to create moods that relate to different parts of the story."

"Everybody says that L.A.'s anonymous, but actually it is the exact opposite," Mann says. "It is so culturally dense that when you go to a shopping mall in Whittier, the only thing in English is going to be the exit sign. It's all Cantonese. Same thing with Little Saigon, Korea Town. I love the cultural depth, but it's not going to present itself to you. You've got to go looking for it."

One of the key "Collateral" scenes takes place in one such enclave, at the El Rodeo jazz club.

"That really is the name of the club and we changed not one thing, including the security," Mann says. "The guards play themselves. Same with El Tenur, the Mexican disco. It's all very, very specific."

Sipping an espresso in a Century City hotel suite, Mann says he savored "Collateral's" compression of time, space and character.

"When you're in the cab, what you're seeing is a face against a window, against these mobile cityscapes that I could then manipulate to suit the characters and the story. It's not by accident that when Tom and Jamie's characters are at their most personal, they're traveling through this red desert of impersonality from the abandoned refineries on the outskirts of L.A."

To capture his vision of a nocturnal 21st century urban jungle, Mann shot 90 percent of the movie with a high-definition digital video system he helped develop with Sony.

"Film doesn't record what our eyes can see at night. I moved into shooting digital video in high definition so we could see into the night, to see everything the naked eye can see and more. You see this moody landscape with hills and trees and strange light patterns. The night becomes the world that these men are moving through. Los Angeles is this landscape of dreams." The nighttime setting also inspired Mann to conjure one of the most striking scenes in "Collateral," when cabbie and assassin are stopped dead in their tracks by a coyote trotting through a crosswalk. Mann based the sighting on one of his own late-night commutes.

"I was driving home late one night and stopped at a red light, and three coyotes walked across the intersection like they absolutely owned it," he says. "It wasn't just the presence of wild animals in the middle of the city; it was their attitude that this was still their domain and this layer of civilization was merely temporary. I wanted to tell a story that evokes some of the wildness that lurks just one layer below the surface."